Web search programs are used to search for locations on a Wide Area Network such as the Internet for locations or sites that contain particular information provided by a user of the web search program. Typically, a user of the web search program provides an input to the web search program, which the web search program uses to identify potential sites or locations on the wide area network. The input provided by the user can be one or more words and can include, for example, a phrase or phrases.
In languages such as English that have a relatively limited alphabet, inputting words or phrases into a web search program with a keyboard or other similar device is a relatively easy task. However, some languages, such as Chinese, include literally hundreds or even thousands of unique characters or symbols that are used to represent words. In those languages, providing input for a web search program is not nearly as trivial as it is, for example, in English.
Languages such as Chinese, with its thousands of characters are obviously not well adapted to be inputted into a program by a keyboard type device. Some progress has been made however, to make such languages more adaptable to being input into a program. Romanized representations, known as pinyin have been created to represent Chinese symbolic characters. For example, zhong1 guo2 are two pinyins that represent the symbols . These symbols represent the Chinese spelling of the word “China.” Thus, by typing zhong1 guo2, the romanized representation of   can be inputted into a computer using a standard keyboard given that the computer has an interface such as Microsoft IME.
Even with the romanized representation of Chinese characters, input into a computer of pinyin representations is a particularly arduous task. In addition, because pinyin strings do not necessarily have a one-to-one representation with Chinese characters, the input of Chinese pinyin strings into a web search program does not provide an optimum method of providing input data for a web query program of the type described above. Thus, there is a need for a web query program that simplifies the input of data to create a string of characters that can be used as an input for a web search engine.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.